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The Social Media Trainer

I'm Justin Cofield, and these are my thoughts on how to use Social Media as a tool in our business.

Running an effective office in the New Era of Vector Marketing will take a different kind of skill set than was required in the past. The best leaders in Vector are the best at engaging people in a meaningful way at the individual level. They understand that each person in their office, from Recruiting Assistants to Sales Reps to Sales Managers, needs to be treated and respected as individuals. No role in the office is a small role.

In the New Era, we need to become as effective at engaging people online as we have been offline for the past 30 years.

There are several benefits of being confident. One that comes to mind is that confidence spurs action. When we start anything new, we gain confidence when we can see progress. When we see progress, we are more confident in our actions, and therefore, more bold to take the next step in our learning.

On the contrary, when we lose confidence in ourselves because we don’t see progress, we lose hope in our abilities, which can paralyze action.

Confidence is important for the development of people because it pushes us forward to achieve even more. I gain confidence through successfully completing small tasks that lead me, step by step, towards my goal. Therefore, it can be said that my confidence is a byproduct of successful experiences.

My confidence is proportionate to my own successful experiences, and OVER confidence becomes a problem when I start to base confidence in my abilities on the successes of someone else’s experiences.

The curse of overconfidence happened to me when I opened up a District Office for Vector Marketing in the summer of 2006. I rightfully had confidence in my personal successes that prepared me for that undertaking, but looking back, I know that I was full of overconfidence because the office I had worked in prior to April 2006 was the #1 office in the nation for sales in 2005. While I rightfully had confidence in my preparatory experiences, the success from someone else’s experience mixed with my confidence, creating too much confidence–overconfidence–for my personal successes.

When things didn’t go the way I had planned, it was not only my overconfidence that evaporated. The confidence that I had rightfully gained evaporated too.

How do we combat the temptation to camp out on the success of others, while at the same develop our own confidence?

1. Be Discerning — Realize which successes are of my own doing, and which successes are others’. Confidence comes with successfully completing tasks that move me closer to my goal.

2. Stay Humble — Humility in the learning process is crucial to healthy success. Humility prevents confidence from developing too early. Confidence without humility gives birth to overconfidence. Another way to say this is, “Overconfidence is the product of premature confidence.”

3. Don’t Lose Hope — Keep our eyes on the goal of what we want to accomplish. In the early stages of a new project–and late stages–there will be successes and setbacks. They inflate and deflate our confidence like a balloon. Setbacks function the same way as does humility, in that they don’t let the balloon inflate too quickly. Overconfidence, however, can make the balloon pop! When too much confidence comes too quickly, we are setting ourselves up for a very humbling experience. So while our confidence is developing, it’s most important that we don’t lose hope along the way to achieving our goal, because the ebb and flow of successes and setbacks keeps our confidence balloon from popping.

Confidence plays a major role not only in the progress of the individual, but in the progress of man. Like the psychologist Daniel Kahneman – Nobel Prize winning cartographer of the human mind, and the author of Thinking, Fast, and Slowmentioned, it’s the optimism and confidence of the entrepreneur that keeps society moving forward. Let’s make sure that our balloons don’t pop along the way.